A first pass at hyperlane removal has arrived in the form of the Hyperspace Truncator, so we can scratch that off the "Future Plans" list already. Like all the other functions, it doesn't require system ownership, so using it to sculpt the galactic landscape is feasible.

Its cousin function, the Hyperspace Connector, is probably next once I'm satisfied that the current setup is stable. I may also have a means of bypassing the annoying air raid klaxon message but I'll make no promises on that quite yet. The Connector is probably going to require delving into customizing the GUI, though, since to feasibly use it will require a better presentation of options than the default Stellaris event popups.

As expected, the Connector has the potential to make a really ugly event box that scrolls off the screen. I still pushed 2.2.0 live without a custom GUI because that's only going to crop up in an edge case where someone managed to stuff >20 systems (I currently allow for up to 24 picks) into a 60 distance radius of the source (which isn't normal but you could do with enough Dowser/Bore abuse I guess).

The lead I had on the message thing turned out to be a dead end, or at least a far, far more difficult end than I can wrestle with at the moment. Right now (after I actually play the game for a bit and see how the Connector feels in real use) I'm going to focus energy on the eldritch magic of Custom GUI work, something I would then apply to all of the mod's presentation.

After that, we'll be looking at a polish pass for mechanics/costs of things (please provide feedback) and then it'll be time to look into the Suppression Obelisks, cheap on/off megastructures that will suppress Augur modifications to that system and that will open the door for me to maybe introduce mechanics that respect things like the Gigastructures Maginot World.

I don't know if it's possible and it's not really needed but maybe there is a way to make hyperlanes "unstable" with some kind of megastructure, where ships get lost of damaged every time they use that specific lane or something

food for thought anyway good mod 10/10

Thanks for the feedback, here and in the main comments! I'm not really good enough to manage something like that without it becoming a mess, I'll admit. What the mod does is basically a bunch of stuff the game does during galaxy generation and certain events, and I don't want to stray too far. I have a very real paranoia of waking up to a dozen+ messages saying some update blew up their game, and one way I avoid that becoming real is by sticking to things I know just work (or, alternately, that I point and go "yeah, it's broken on Paradox's end" like how some functions in general just die in late Huge games with lots of mods running their stuff).

Current pipeline: first run of custom GUI stuff is done. Connector cap upped to 36 systems, Truncator up to 20 (and probably never any higher than this because that's nuts).

Next thing I want to implement is a Truncator addition for full system isolation. Requires Truncator (duh) and Jump Drives (so if you don't have Connector at that point you can still leave without rolling dice on a Dowser). That's going to wait a bit so the mod can rest and more feedback can come in and we don't get update fatigue.

Before I get to messing with jump/augur suppression possibilities I want to do a pass on how everything is working. I have random thoughts but I have to test out stuff and also see what people think so I don't jolt the overall experience of using the mod.

One consideration I have is turning the Augur into an uncustomizable ship like Science Ships and Constructors, and having it hopefully auto-upgrade the beam with technologies. I have to see if that actually works. If it does I may also shrink the ship down to a science vessel chassis.

With that comes a discussion of the fleet cap for Augurs. I've already tested and confirmed that you can run multiple in tandem without any more hiccups than you'd get from having a bunch of science ships triggered events together, so it's possible. I'm thinking a maximum cap of 3 is where I'll leave it, though, because system/hyperlane alteration really slows things down late in the game, especially on larger modlists.

The costs of everything also need to be run through. They were arbitrary when I made them in 1.0 and went "oh I'll adjust them later"... and then just continued with them in 2.0. Energy is a weird thing because empires often tend to either be overfull on it or bankrupt of it; the former means Augurs Go Brrrrr and latter means sadfase no pewpew for youyou. I have no strong opinion on anything to change it to (other than avoiding a custom resource).

Other things I've considered: Random Systems and Treasure Systems. Maybe Random Treasure Systems, even. Lots of directions this could go and nothing exactly solid on what I want to do with it, though.

Binaries and Trinaries will be coming. I'm back on the "I don't think I want to do O-class stars" train, though, if just because I don't want to trivialize the effort put into the Stellar Manipulation mod. You can already just print new systems and suck those up to make your Os through that process without me having to actually bite the bullet and involve interoperability with another mod.

That's today's stream of consciousness. The GUI stuff really fried my remaining two brain cells good, you may have noticed, but we got to something workable. Now for a rest, some playing of the game, and figuring out where to go next.

What about an inverted function of your isolate idea? "web" where it connects to the three closest systems everytime it's used, connector cap still applies.
This might be asking too much, but have you considered adding an improved version of the hyperspace augur beam to Ancient Cache of Technologies mod?
In that mod you can get improved, delta and alpha versions of the colossus weapons so something like that for this mod would fit really well if both mods are together.

Web could be possible but may require someone smarter than me to make it work (I haven't bothered to see if there's a straightforward way to nab a list of the three closest by euclidean distance systems that aren't connected, there probably is but I've been surprised before). I try to keep what this thing does as dumb as possible.

I'm avoiding forced interoperability with other mods at this point because I am so slow on updates. This is meant to passively complement runs with things like Gigas and ACOT and both those mods update either often or bigly and I don't want things breaking when I don't have time to look at them.

I'm still thinking on raising the cap but making Augurs uncustomizable. Testing that's on my "when time and ambition permit" list (which is probably after Overlord releases).

First stage of changing up the Augur is done for 2.4.0. It's still running on the Colossus-scale chassis (I tried the science ship and it was an absolute headache; I'm basically going to have to rig up my own version to make it work and I'm not that ambitious right now), but it's no longer designable and upgrades itself for free like science and constructor ships. I removed the extra levels of augur beam, so by default all operations are half a year now. The numbers of Augurs an empire can have will increase by 1 for each 250 fleet cap you have, up to 3 Augurs total now.

The tech branch is rejigged a bit now too. The Connector and Truncator are now the default tools of the Augur unlocked with the initial tech (which makes more lore sense and wasn't that way from the beginning primarily because they were the most recent additions to the mod). The costs of operations have been reduced, some slightly and others more dramatically (truncate/connect went down to 2.5K from 10K). This in combination with the increase in speed and fleet cap for Augurs is meant to encourage some more hyperlane sculpting.

Two new operations have been added based on suggestions. The Isolator cuts of all hyperlanes to the system, for when you want a quick total detachment (think L-Gates about to open and dump a swarm on you). The Advanced Bore runs the same as the Bore but allows the direction to be specified at cardinal/intercardinal directions. There's a bit of wiggle on the exactness (5 degrees in either direction is what I arrived at, anything more felt bad). I was also going to allow some range specification, but Advanced Bore by itself already takes up more event code than everything else in the mod combined so I shelved that for a future refactor when I have brain juice to figure things out on a new interface for the whole thing.

Everything is nominally good but I'm going to sit on pushing 2.4.0 until Overlord comes out because of how sweeping the changes are. I also want to take a look at how the new catapult actually functions and see if I can get some ideas from that (Hypertrav 3.0 with a mother megastructure that can target its operations? Who knows.)

Perhaps an option to generate a purely random system could be added, so modded stars and such can be randomly generated

Originally posted by Scyobi_Empire:

Perhaps an option to generate a purely random system could be added, so modded stars and such can be randomly generated

The next big patch for this is a refactor of the system generators to try and make it more easily extensible, and that's one of the things the refactor will enable me to do more easily.

The plan in my head is to have random unlock with the initial Dowsing tech and be the true early-tech discount choice. This would yield any of the current star types as well as binary/trinary systems (which would have their own force-spawn categories too, but would be more random by necessity).

I'm going to let Paradox stabilize 3.4 a bit more before jumping into that though. There's also a full rework of the UI planned as part of these changes so I can better present and fit all the options without making people click through a bunch of events to select each parameter (the ultimate goal here being an Advanced Bore implementation with direction and distance parameters). I'm not good with UI so I'm trying to learn how everybody else does their UI stuff before jumping into that mess.

Still getting my head around the planned refactor. I'm just not that good with UI so it's going to take me getting the I-really-want-to-learn bug to figure it all out.

In the meantime, with the next bump there's a new feature in the pipeline: Lifesigns Dowsing and Boring.

In function, you will have a new "star type" you'd look for. Instead of specifying the class of the star, you are instead seeking a nearby system with signs of life to connect. What does that mean? The newly connected star will be occupied either by space fauna (Tiyanki, Amoebas, Drones, Clouds, Crystals) or will have a planet inhabited by a primitive civilization.

The fauna category will no doubt provide some fodder for the new Cordyceptic Drones. It also helps out people running things that require contact or analysis of the fauna (e.g. I really like the ESC crystal weapons and have awful luck first contacting crystals before the AI empires get to them).

The primitives of course are for Necrophages and other folks with uses for them. Like roleplaying a benevolent ascended nation that uplifts species and helps them get started in the larger universe? Or maybe you're just a really, really Determined Exterminator? Either way, we've got you covered.

I'm still debating how much control people will have on what they get. One thing I'm not allowing is for this to work on the Advanced Bore. You take lifesigns where you can find them, right?

Originally posted by Vauthil:

A potential balancing throttle I may add in the future is "manipulation fatigue", a % chance every time you use the Augur on a star that it'll stress out the local hyperspace fabric and prevent further direct manipulation at that star. I'm still thinking about it.

The "Manipulation Fatique" sounds interesting, but I think it should be temporary.(Probally via a modifier) And, maybe it just increases the cost (drasticly), and each time you manipulate the hyperlanes while it still has fatique increases the duration, and if the fatique duration gets above "x" years, it becomes permanent!

Originally posted by Vauthil:

One thing I'm not allowing is for this to work on the Advanced Bore. You take lifesigns where you can find them, right?

What do you mean? Are you saying only the more basic ones can do it? Why? That honestly doesn't make much sense to me.

Dirty admission: that's an excuse I made, but it's also because I don't want to do the copy/paste work of forcing it to work with the current Advanced Bore implementation and would prefer to decide on allowing it when I refactor the event code.

Currently the bulk of the mod's file size is the Advanced Bore, because each star type and direction is its own generation subevent. I know there has to be a better way to do this with some saved parameters, but I don't have the mental energy to work it out currently.

The eventual dream is having one menu for the system generators where you specify the star type, direction, and distance all at once and it calculates the cost from those parameters and you fire it.

On the back end it'd be a rewrite of how system generation is called that should make things happier with mods that change up vanilla system generation (right now I mostly use my own initializers for the non-exotic stars and I'd like to change it to full vanilla as part of this).

Originally posted by Vauthil:

Dirty admission: that's an excuse I made, but it's also because I don't want to do the copy/paste work of forcing it to work with the current Advanced Bore implementation and would prefer to decide on allowing it when I refactor the event code.

Currently the bulk of the mod's file size is the Advanced Bore, because each star type and direction is its own generation subevent. I know there has to be a better way to do this with some saved parameters, but I don't have the mental energy to work it out currently.

The eventual dream is having one menu for the system generators where you specify the star type, direction, and distance all at once and it calculates the cost from those parameters and you fire it.

On the back end it'd be a rewrite of how system generation is called that should make things happier with mods that change up vanilla system generation (right now I mostly use my own initializers for the non-exotic stars and I'd like to change it to full vanilla as part of this).

fair enough (:

First iteration of the Ripper, a system generator that connects via wormhole instead of hyperlane, is now live. It's something of a ridiculous technology so it has high tech requirements and costs 75000 Energy to use. Yes, even if you blitz the tech you still have to pay the toll, but it shouldn't be a problem for advanced empires.

In this first iteration the direction is selectable, just like the Advanced Bore, but the distance goes from far to very far at a range of 100 to 200 units (compare to the normal Dowse/Bore range of 10 to 40, or the Connector's reach of 60). It would get very annoying very quickly putting in event code for a more granular range control so that isn't in, but this will definitely get some range options in the future.

I have an idea on something I can do for the advanced interfaces that's a median solution to my dream version. Also I think things are getting complicated enough that we may need a startup config so people can disable things they don't want.